Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs - Softcover

Benford, Gregory; Malartre, Elisabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 076531083X ISBN 13: 9780765310835

Publisher: Forge Books, 2008

Synopsis

Would your body work better with some artificial parts? Will you live longer, perhaps a lot longer, than you now expect? The next decade promises another qualitative shift in the way we view technology, as once purely fictional concepts―robots, cyborg parts, and the many variations in between―become part of reality.

Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre's Beyond Human treats the landscape of human self-change and robotic development as poles of the same phenomenon. Can we go too far in making ourselves machine-like or making machines resemble us? Once made, what will such creatures think about us? These questions will arise in myriad ways in the next few decades, as we press against boundaries that a short while ago existed only in works of the imagination. Written in a lively and provocative style, this is a readable book about the accumulation of small scientific advances that add up to something large and challenging.

About this title

About the Author

GREGORY BENFORD teaches at the University of California and lives in Irvine, California. Benford is a winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, and the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. In1995 he received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experimentation, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers in fields of physics from condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and several in biological conservation.

ELIZABETH MALARTRE is the pen name for a biologist and writer living in Laguna Beach. She is a multiple-award winning environmentalist with a 25-year career in land preservation. Her current research centers on the Pandora moth in the Eastern Sierra in California.

From Publishers Weekly

The simple title of this book belies its profundity-and its sense of humor. Besides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of developments in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, physicist Benford and biologist Malartre also address deeper questions about the relationship between the brain and the mind, as well as humankind's nervous relationship with increasingly sophisticated machines. Looking at robots' use in all areas, such as unskilled labor, precision work (like surgery), the home and the battlefield, Benford and Malartre take into account not just the latest research and developments, but the long popularity of robots and cyborgs in pop culture (citing movies like A.I. and The Day the Earth Stood Still). Their concluding argument, that consciousness and the intellectual power of the human mind emerge from the complexity of the brain, and thus cannot be reduced to the functioning of its individual components, leads them to doubt, convincingly, that robots (machines that mimic humans) and cyborgs (man-machine hybrids) will ever amount to more than sophisticated tools, enhancing human life but never replacing it. Throughout, the authors maintain a playful sense, an optimistic view of the future and a steady grip on this rapidly expanding field.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 076531083X
• ISBN 13: 9780765310835
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272